Booyah! The Manic Universe of Jim Cramer

TV's hottest financial-advice giver goes deep, fumbles and still scores.

By Andrew Feinberg

From Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine, September 2006

Jim Cramer, who as the host of CNBC's Mad Money is the cable network's biggest star, is probably the first person in the history of television to wear a Little Orphan Annie wig and a football helmet simultaneously. Or to grill rubber bears and then eat them. Or to tell a caller who asked about a stock that Cramer had thought of buying, "You must be inside my head with another 20 people. I'm calling the fire marshal!"

There is, seemingly, almost nothing Cramer won't do to get a laugh or hook his viewers. One of the show's running gags is a barking-dog sound effect. "Oh, it's Vonage the dog," says Cramer, referring to one of the year's most pitiful initial stock offerings. Cramer, a founder of TheStreet.com and a former hedge-fund manager, is famous for throwing chairs on the show. His explanation: "I hate chairs."

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Critics say the show is more like pro wrestling than Wall Street Week. (They note that Mad Money's producer used to oversee the Jerry Springer Show.) Others grouse that Cramer is "self-reverential" and "totally conceited." Jon Friedman, a columnist at MarketWatch, says that Cramer crossed the line into self-parody when he boiled up a box of Uncle Ben Bernanke's rice on the air. Jim Cramer? Self-parody? What a concept!

But Cramer knows this and he plays off it, often brilliantly. It makes for edgy theater. "He's irresistible to watch," says Michael Wolff, Vanity Fair columnist, CNBC contributor and Cramer friend. "There's a kind of poetry when he talks about the market. And part of the fun is the possibility that you're watching a train wreck."

Whether you think Cramer is a blessing or a bane, a breath of fresh air or an endless stream of hot air, it's hard to call him uninteresting or to deny that his TV success says something important about the habits of individual investors in 2006.

Jim Cramer was born on February 10, 1955, in Wyndmoor, Pa., a middle-class suburb north of Philadelphia. His father was a paper-goods wholesaler and his mother a sculptor. After graduating from Harvard in 1976, he spent four years as a journalist, including a stint at The American Lawyer magazine. Cramer, who began his love affair with stocks as a child, honed his investing skills while attending Harvard Law in the early 1980s. While in law school he got his first client, New Republic owner Martin Peretz. Cramer then became a broker at Goldman Sachs, and in 1987 he left to start a hedge fund, Cramer Levy Partners. The fund was 100% in cash at the time of the 1987 crash.

Cramer co-founded TheStreet.com with Peretz in 1996. But with the frenetic life of money management taking a toll on his personality -- he admits he acted like a maniac at the office and often missed family vacations -- Cramer quit his hedge fund after a spectacular 2000 (it gained 36%, while Standard & Poor's 500-stock index sank 9%).

In 2001, Cramer decided to take the insights he gained at TheStreet.com to another medium. He started a syndicated radio show, Jim Cramer's RealMoney, the clear progenitor of Mad Money. He launched the TV show in March 2005, and the world of financial journalism -- to use the term loosely -- has not been the same since.

Cramer is on the set taping his show, which is done in segments, with five- to ten-minute breaks between each one. During the breaks he chats with a visitor. He seems happy, but also insecure, as if he were asking, "Did you really think it was good?" At that moment, he comes across much more as a TV or Hollywood type than a money guy, more George Clooney than George Soros.

Much of this particular show will be about finding value in emerging markets. Cramer suggests holding up a globe, à la Charlie Chaplin in The Great Dictator. His nephew Cliff, who works on the show, chimes in, "And then say, 'I am the 21st-century Chaplin.' " Cramer replies, "I love the hubris of that." And then he does just that on the show, with a smile that suggests his ego is just another one of his many props.

During the show, he makes references to great battles of World War I (the Somme, Verdun and first through third Ypres), as well as the Maginot Line, the author Céline and Prince Hal -- or, more accurately, Prince HAL, as in Halliburton. What's with all the name-dropping? "Doing all this Western Civ stuff makes it fun for me," he says. "No one else has to get it. The show, selfishly, is about my having a good time." Besides, he says, a lot of his viewers are college students who do get many of the allusions.

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